Aspirations dashed

This is a letter to the editor from my father who passed away on Sept. 9, 2006, the 90th anniversary of his own mother's birth.

Published July 10, 2004


Editor:

Well, the election is over and any hope for democratic reform in our federal House of Commons has been defeated. Also the hopes and aspirations of the western provinces to finally have a say within the federal government have been dashed.

To those of us who are termed political junkies and have studied history, there is an endless line, dating back to times before Confederation of the eastern interests looking at the West only as a resource to be exploited for the benefit of eastern interests. Originally, an English king gave everything west of Ontario to the Hudson Bay Company. Their mandate was to exploit the resources, which they did. At that time this mainly consisted of the fur trade. When our founding fathers arranged to buy the West from the Hudson Bay Company, they too assumed that all the resources of Western Canada belonged to them and carried on with the same agenda, only now they have added our other resources and our taxes to the exploitation.

The first western protest movement was probably the Riel rebellion. Since then, rather than take up rifles and fight for independence and our rights, the West has chosen to do it legally through what is called the political process. Those of us who are old enough to remember, or who have studied history, know that we've gone through several different political movements in an attempt to achieve our dreams. The first I recall was in the 1920's and it was named the United Farmers party, headquartered in the prairie provinces. Then we had the Progressive Party, soon to be folded into the Conservative Party. Next we tried monetary reform with the Social Credit Party, and even flirted with socialism through the CCF Party of Coldwell and Tommy Douglas. Finally we realized that the system was stacked against us and we started the Reform movement, knowing that to break the stranglehold of special interests on the political system we had to change the system. We dreamed of a grass-roots democracy whereby an elected Member of Parliament could have a free vote to do as his constituents wanted him/her to do. We desired an elected Senate free of political patronage appointments. We also sought the breaking of the Prime Minister's hold on every patronage job down to the very smallest in the country. To borrow a quote from Martin Luther King," we had a dream". Unfortunately there were people in the country who wanted to keep the status quo (many of them were westerners.) and did everything they could to convince voters that change could be disastrous. The last week of the campaign was a travesty of fear mongering from those wishing to retain power and unfortunately many people swallowed the bait.

So what's next? Separation of the West from the East? Would this accomplish anything? Do we just sit back and watch history repeat itself once more with loads of broken promises? I don't know what to think I guess we will soon learn just how discouraging an experience this has been.

Bob Hilborn,
Craigdarroch Beach,